Hey college news, it’s your older brother: hyperlocal.

We’re not so different, you and I. We’re both industries dominated by the inexperienced. We both have to cover a specific community. In fact, it could be argued that collegiate journalism is a subset of hyperlocal.

Fortunately for you this means that we all share the same problems. Both college newspapers and hyperlocal sites are figuring out the best ways to monetize a geographic area of like-minded people, often through the Web.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis and the folks at CUNY, we know that some hyperlocal sites are pulling in $200,000 a year. We also know of some college newspapers that are self-sustaining. There are successful companies in both our spaces, yet many of us struggle to grasp the fundamentals of the business.

That is why the team behind Technically Philly has proposed News Inkubator, a shared office spaces and business services hub for hyperlocal news sites in Philadelphia. Picture a shared office space and a shared sales staff that help hyperlocals generate revenue ideas together, while still maintaining their editorial and business independence.

News Inkubator is also about bridging the entrepreneurial and media communities in Philadelphia to help foster a working relationship were each side learns from the other. All of these concepts can translate to benefit your college publication. In fact, here are three of our ideas that I hope you steal:

Use the existing bureaucracy

Universities have already separated students by interest. The computer science students often belong to a different school than the business students that belong to a different school than the journalism students. Why not bring all three of these sides together?

Each can have a project for the semester and learn from the other students. To survive in 2010, journalism grads are going to need to know how businesses work. Business grads are going to have to understand new media and computer science students need client work to showcase when they graduate.

If time becomes an issue, lobby to create a new class. Department heads love to show each other how innovative they are, so ask them to help.

The space is cheap

Many college newspapers rent (or are given) office space from the university negating one of the biggest hurdles in legitimizing an online hyperlocal entity. Use this to your advantage. Host speakers that are business leaders from local companies. You could even spring for some pizza and host a hackathon or barcamp open to all majors and career paths to build products for the paper.

Spoke, meet hub

Many college have student-run blogs or organization websites. Aggregate and create content partnerships with everyone who also covers what you cover. There is no need for overlap in your college’s media market.

As the college newspaper, you have an established editorial process and revenue streams, so offer to be the hub for your local sites and maybe even work out a revenue sharing plan. It will be good training for covering any niche after you graduate and can free up your paper’s already limited resources to pursue more in-depth journalism and even work on new revenue models together.

The three founders of Technically Philly met at the Temple News, and we use the skills we learned there everyday. Use your time at a college newspaper to not only flex your reporting muscles but also see if you can start a side project that makes a little more money for the paper. Your wallet will thank you when you graduate.

Be sure to give our application a read and offer any criticism. The harsher, the better.

Contact Sean Blanda at sean@technicallyphilly.com or follow him on Twitter, @seanblanda.

• Is Crowdfunding the Future of Journalism? – Crowdfunding may or may not be the future of journalism, but crowdlinking is one way of determining which stories are hot. Everyone who’s anyone linked to this story on Twitter. The story covers some of the successes and challenges of projects such as Spot.us and Chi-town Daily News. It will be interesting to see who in the college market follows suit.
• DjangoCon is coming to town. My town, at least. DjangoCon will be in Portland this September 8th through 12th. The first three days will be conference days, and the last two will be code sprint days. If you can make it to Portland, student tickets are only $135.00 for all five days. We might even be able to put together a small, college-media specific component.
• Announcing the Publish2 WordPress plugin: Do more with your links – Full disclosure: this was my baby that we finally released officially into the wild. With a feature called Link Assist, It makes it much simpler to access your Publish2 links while writing a story. The plugin also makes it simple to add your links to your sidebar or create a “What We’re Reading” page for your readers. /shameless self-promotion
• How Useful (and Usable) is Your Site? – A simple set of exercises to tell whether your newspaper website is actually worth using or not. See if yours passes the test; if not, you probably have work to do.

On the note of WordPress, you should upgrade your Google Analyticator plugin. Among a new set of features released with version 5.0, the plugin now offers one-click authentication with Google and makes it super easy to access your analytics on the WordPress dashboard.

This morning, I started a thread on commenting policy best practices based on a question we received. The success stories I’ve heard in the past year have been coming from the Daily Gazette at Swarthmore and NYU Local. Both have actively engaged communities. The Daily Gazette keeps things civil by recording the location of the commenter (whether they’re on campus or off), encouraging them to sign up for an account, and allowing fellow commenters to vote on the quality of comments. NYU Local requires all commenters to use both first and last names. Depending on the amount of participation on the thread, I might roll the results into a blog post.

On the wiki, The College Voice has started maintaining a list of their current projects which include “designing a new icon and masthead to go along with its new website, all launching in September 2009 as part of its online development project” and also “developing a pdf archive of its issues, from the 1990s, and hopefully scanning its editions from its premiere in 1977.” For anyone else interested, if you include this section on your organization’s profile then it’s an easy way for us to keep up to date on what you’re working on.

At The Maine Campus, Will Davis is finishing up a classifieds system he built in PHP from scratch. One advantage? If you want to add a feature, you just build it. There’s a new feature on Will’s project every time I look at it (most recently, an RSS feed of all items posted). I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it this fall.

College media is a funny beast. It seems to lag about a year to three years behind the mainstream media. This applies web-first thinking, blogging, web site design, and monetization. So, this weekend, when the CoPress forum became an active discussion of CPM vs CPC vs CPD ad models, I couldn’t help but grin twice.

First, because this is a conversation that the rest of the media had a few years ago (and has never resolved), and second, because this struck on a particular passion of mine – monetizing online media. (Go figure, the Business Director is interested in monetization)

The following post is an expansion of my forum comments, and still worth a read if you’ve already been through the forum.

The Current System

There are really three ways for advertisers: by impression, by click, and by time period (usually day). Of course, there are hybrids of all three models, which the top ad networks utilize (Facebook, Google). The issue, is that all of these models have some inherent flaw. CPM doesn’t reward for the effectiveness of an ad, CPC necessarily reward high traffic, and CPD, while it guarantees a nice minimum about you can make, has both of the same issues.

Take into account that college media has a monopoly over the vast majority of the 18-24 year-old US population. That’s demographic is the most desired by advertisers. And if my rough, non-scientific, survey is to be believed, less that one third of online college readership is actually students, it’s parents and alumni, who represent a middle-class, educated, demographic – precisely what any good advertiser wants.

Translation: you’re serving ads to a very valuable, niche, audience, that you have a monopoly over.

Analytics

One of the things that the forum conversation pointed out was the inaccuracy and the poor quality of the analytics available right now. Different software suites give different numbers, and non of them are really ‘correct.’

That’s a huge issue, because if you’re relying on those numbers to charge CPM, you stand to loose money.

Of course, as Bryan Murley points out, the holy grail of analytics right now is the ability to measure user engagement. Which would tell us how much a user was – using – the site. But, with such poor basic analytics, the challenge to create this data is compounded.

The moral of this story, is to have several different analytics suites measuring your audience. Know you can’t really trust any of them either.

Geography

The huge downside to these awesome demographics is that they’re usually not geographically similar. That means that you’re local adverts may not be your best market for online ads.

Take a look at your analytics, and I’m sure you’ll find that your pageviews mostly aren’t local. Try to serve ads that target all your audiences. Yes, an ad for a local pizza joint is good, but irrelevant if you don’t live near campus. Ads for Macy’s on the other hand, apply to everyone. Not to mention, national ads pay very well.

In the same vein, don’t forget that you’ll have a lot of alumni visiting the site. Go to your alumni office. Tell them you have a lot of alumni viewership. They may not know.

Alumni offices spend ridiculous amounts of money trying to contact alumni to get more money out of them. You can get a chunk of that money too! Make your case, and sell them a decent spot for a long-term contract. Then charge them a hefty amount – after-all, you’re a great way of reaching their market.

Concerned about relevancy for students? Go to the career center, and have them team up with alumni office. There’s gotta be alumni who want to hire interns and grads.

Crazy? I was Crazy Once!

Okay, normal, plain ideas out of the way. Let me present some crazier, more involved ones.

One suggestion of Revenue Two Point Zero, was to limit your ad inventory, therefore decreasing supply. This will allow you to drive up costs. Simple economics, right?

Even better, fewer ads means users aren’t nearly as annoyed by an assault of brightly colored, non-relevant content. A better UX means you’ll get more repeat users.

Another idea out of Rev2oh, was to sell only larger, more eye catching ads. The idea is to help avoid ad blindness.

Our example from the forum, the Tulane Hullabaloo, has 3 display ads on the site, one of which ia Google AdWords. Google Ads, while convenient, don’t have great revenue, and you’ll make much more money from selling ads yourselves.

Of course, that means having a motivated and trained online ad sales team. Who, since they’re paid on commission, don’t stand to gain much by selling online ads. Increase the cost of online ads, and you actually stand to sell more.

The Better Plan

OK, with me so far? Now let’s get out-of-the-box:

Institute a rule that 60% of your ads must be either a coupon, or a notification of a sale/deal (that’s actually legit), with the intention of increasing this to 95%+ in the coming years. I base this off two facts: people describe online ads as annoying, and in my own observation, print ads, which are usually described as informative, are primarily coupons or notifications of sales.

Of course, coupons are really the way to go. They will not only make your users happier, but they’ll drive traffic to your site and to your advertiser’s site and store. It’s a win all around.

Now, how do you serve them? Offer some sort of hybrid: charge for a run time, but make a deal with your advertiser that if you get a spike in traffic, they’ll be charged for the additional views. It’s your market, control it. This clause will allow you to ensure that when high traffic comes, you’re not out of inventory.

But… don’t be evil, if your advertiser wants to opt-out of the deal, then let them. With no hassle. Just be sure to sell enough ads to have an inventory ready if you do spike.

No One Really Knows

The single biggest issue with online media is monetization. I’ve noticed college media becoming more interested in the topic over the last year or so. That’s a good thing, because the mainstream haven’t cracked this nut yet, and it’s very possible that the niche, high-value demographic, monopolistic market of college media will be the one to solve it.

The background

College news organizations need to move beyond advertising. Now.

Hold that thought.

Some background: The topic of generating revenue to sustain news organizations has begun to consume my thoughts about journalism. There are a number of reasons why, but this mostly came after a little meetup last Saturday in DC called RevenueTwoPointZero (Rev2oh on Twitter).

This isn’t the first time our humble CoPress crew is talking about the business side of journalism. Namely, check out Joey Baker‘s post from December, “But we make all our money from newsprint!”.

But why? Aren’t we just about technology and college news sites?

No. That’s a main theme, but we would be remiss if we left revenue off the table. It’s hard to run a news site without money, unless you’re an exception.

Actually, one of our three main goals directly relates to making money: We want student news organizations to generate more online revenue by having full control over their sites.

Getting back to my opening thought…

The reality

College news sites have mostly been playing catchup to the pros. OK. “College students still read campus newspapers,” according to a 2008 Alloy Marketing study. No real harm done by being late to the video game, for example.

Student media are also looking to the Web as a way to generate revenue, mostly through different forms of advertising. This could mean banner ads, contextual ads, floating ads, video pre-roll (cringe), pop-ups (double cringe) or something else. Nothing innovative, from what I’ve seen. Nothing that’s resulting in a possible paradigm shift, such as the buzz from Russ Stanton’s LA Times onlne revenue revelation.

“But we’re getting along OK online, right?” you might ask. Probably. But the point is that we cannot wait until we need solutions to devise and implement them. Unlike some metro papers, college publications can’t afford to lose a million a week (scroll down halfway).

We need to be proactive. We need to be at least two steps ahead.

The proposal

And those first two steps are really not hard. It’s could be as easy as changing the mindset of the business office and bringing in new people. OK, the first one can be really hard.

In the context of college media, where print revenue appears to be holding up better than the big metro papers (with exceptions: “College papers cut staffs, Friday editions due to lagging ad sales”), there’s still plenty of room to grow online advertising. With this in mind, “an estimated 1-2 percent of total revenue for many college media outlets — if that,” says CICM’s Bryan Murley.

Beyond that, there’s an immense opportunity for generating revenue in other ways, which is the second step. That could be anything from offering consulting on how clients can more effectively reach the 18-24 demographic to selling baked goods in the student union.

So who’s responsible? Everyone on your staff, from editorial to business. That doesn’t mean news reporters will be selling ads, just that everyone should be part of the solution. Contributions could be as simple as brainstorming or as hands-on as consulting in ways that don’t conflict with one’s news role.

“But I’m not a business major!” Rev2oh comprised only non-business people. Participants had a variety of backgrounds, but it was primarily a design-oriented group. At least one person asked why there weren’t any business/advertising people. Alan Jacobson, who organized the event with SND president Matt Mansfield, basically said: They’ve had their chance, they haven’t done enough or haven’t been successful and now it’s up to us.

That doesn’t mean you should “go it alone,” but you don’t need that crowd to get stuff done. In many cases, I’m sure they would provide excellent insights.

Just like we need to take lessons from outside of news in order to improve news, we need to take lessons from outside the normal news organization business office to keep the money flowing.

The idea

We need revenue, not just advertising.

I like many of the ideas Steve Outing has discussed (check out his business model-related posts). Instead of rehashing them here, I’ll just say that all of the following thoughts developed after listening to him on the Journalism Now podcasts and after hearing a number of similar ideas from the small business group at Rev2oh, namely Scripps Interactive’s Jay Small.

• Your college news organization’s newly renamed “Revenue Office” no longer focuses solely on advertising, nor does it serve a single customer — your news organization. It should offer specialized services for off-campus clients.
• This could include everything from helping them establish a Web site and online brand to helping them promote their product or service on campus.
• Regarding setting up a site, there is certainly demand. I couldn’t find reliable statistics, but it’s safe to say that many small businesses in college towns could benefit by having (A) a Web site, (B) a freshly redesigned site, (C) a more interactive site, (D) presence on appropriate social media and (E) better presence on social media, for example.
• Another idea would be to have the revenue office offer research and data that would help the client, from student surveys to conducting focus groups. Basically, as Outing and Small separately referenced, this staff would be like an advertising/marketing department for the client.
• An important note: they would NOT be public relations.

There are so many possibilities, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel as a starting point. Yes, we need to look for new models and think outside the box, but we can start by adapting existing models in different fields.

I’m going to be speaking with The Miami Hurricane‘s business manager about these and other ideas soon. The adviser for the yearbook asked me to meet with those leaders to discuss ideas. I implore you to do the same, even if it’s just to get the conversation started.

Final thoughts:

• Open your mind.
• Listen to any and all ideas.
• Don’t be afraid to fail.
• Read Alan Jacobson’s initial posts on Rev2oh. Contact him. Find others like him. Their out-of-the-box thinking will open your mind. I certainly didn’t agree with Alan on every subject, but within half a day I saw the business side of news — and the possibilities — in a whole new light. He and Matt didn’t simply put us in a different pair of shoes. We were in a whole different outfit.
• Live long and prosper.

UPDATE: Check this out, Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet.

Link-tastic

Here are some links to help provide more context and background on Rev2oh:

• RevenueTwoPointZero » March 21st Manifesto
• RevenueTwoPointZero » The Opportunity
• SND Update – An effort to find new revenue models launches

The results on Rev2oh site:

• Display advertising solutions
• Classified solutions
• iPhone solutions
• Small business solutions: Beyond the click

More details about the results on SND Update:

• Small business solutions: Beyond the click
• How news organizations can take back classifieds
• Rethinking advertising + the homepage experience
• Mobile: Paying for functionality in news apps

Other related links

• Putting the search for a business model into perspective – Visual Editors
  
• RevenueTwoPointZero posts prototypes – Visual Editors
• Day after Revenue 2.0 #rev2oh – Patrick Cooper
  

Links that were passed around before and after:

• Online Payment Plan? How About a Print Print Payment Plan? (Matt Mansfield) – requires free registration
• Huge New Ad Unit Spotted In The Wild At NYTimes.com (Patrick Thornton)
• 27 Huge Publishers Join To Replace The Banner (Patrick Thornton)
• iList and Micro iList (William Couch)

Podcasts about revenue for news

• This Week in CoPress: Monetizing Online Student News
  
• Journalism Now Podcast – Making Money without Micropayments

Guests: Brad Arendt, Boise State Arbiter; Kevin Schwartz, Daily Tar Heel; Max Cutler, Yale Daily News; Joey Baker, Daily Orange

Summary: A comprehensive introduction to the current state of online newspaper monetization. Most student newspapers make less than 10% of their overall revenue from online, and the limitations seem to be a lack of infrastructure and inventory. The Daily Tar Heel has had success with Heels Housing, an interactive student housing guide, and Max Cutler recommends Google Ad Manager over OpenX because of its relative ease of use.

Related: Forum discussing strategies for monetizing online

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Have feedback or ideas for an upcoming podcast? Let us know!

In the Community

We launched our first forum this week, asking about what is needed for student news organizations to collaborate. As of writing, Emily Ingram has been the only one to respond, but she offers good tips for what a collaborative platform might need: a place to crowdsource a solution for a particularly difficult problem, a source for tips and tricks that have worked for other young journalists, and a source of inspiration so we can stay innovative amid all the doom-and-gloom talk.

Our new wiki also saw the light of day this week with a number of excellent contributions, including two profile pages for student news organizations I hadn’t heard from before: The Snapper (running WordPress) and The Maneater (running Django). We’re very excited to have them in the community. There’s also a bunch of new WordPress themes listed if you’re looking for something to build from.

Around the Network

Jackie Hai, of the Amherst Wire, reports on a first-ever student media summit at UMass. The goal was to “have people from each group meet face-to-face and open up channels of communication, paving the way for a collaborative workflow in delivering a more unified news experience to readers and viewers” and it appears as though they’ve already found several ways to come together.

Bryan Murley at the Center for Innovation in College Media (CICM) has announced a pretty darn comprehensive college media contest. It’s all about online media, and he’s looking for the best examples of multimedia, use of data in reporting, and overall web presence, among other criteria.

Andrew Dunn has proposed a syllabus for studying news business models, and it has been pretty well received in the community. There’s talk of doing this completely online, which would be very cool.

The Whitman Pioneer, a weekly newspaper at Whitman College, has relaunched with a new WordPress theme for its website. Andrew Spittle, the new Web Manager, has more details on his blog.

Shameless plug. In response to a growing chorus of discontent about the Daily Emerald, I wrote a post about the steps they should take to regain trust and learn how to innovate. It’s all about transparency, and I think such transparency could lead to better buy-in from the community.

Why not writing a story is innovation – Publishing 2.0
Daniel: Down with rewriting and publishing press releases (and other such nonsense)!

MediaShift Idea Lab: Mistakes I made with the Next Newsroom Project | PBS

Joey: Regarding the KNC grant:

• include enough money to hire a few people
• recognize that the project is going to take time; a lot of it
• don’t overcomplicate your life. use free software to make things move quickly. It’s all about the version 1!

Knight Digital Media Center: Leadership: Leadership Report 2008: Action Steps

Joey:  Here are some of the actions editors at the 2008 KDMC leadership conference decided to take:

• Put someone in charge of analyzing and understanding Web metrics
• Hold editors accountable for Web traffic to their pages and sites
• Develop a strategy for mobile news and information delivery
• Break down an all-encompassing plan for a new portal into small bites or iterations that can launch successively
• Reduce a long priority list to a few most important items and focus on them
• Develop a strategy for social networking
• Launch different affinity networks with frequency; keep the ones that work, scrap those that don’t.
• Train staff about key audiences for the Web and print products
• Treat the daily newspaper as a niche product and focus resources accordingly
• Wholesale video packages to local television outlets.

Why CoPress Matters – Journalism 3.0
Daniel: Emily writes a pretty convincing case for CoPress.

Link Journalism Drives Page Views and Engagement – Publishing 2.0

Not Dead: The Paid-for Online Model | Monday Note

Joey: He never says ‘freemium,’ but that’s what he means. The idea: charge people that have excess page views

The market and the internet don’t care if you make money – Publishing 2.0

Joey: There must be a business model for news.

We’ve got a problem at The Daily Orange: our ad revenue is shrinking.

Sound familiar? A newspaper that’s having trouble making ends meet!?

We were having such difficulty balancing our budget, that we cut our print Friday edition (we still publish online).

The Daily Orange is an independent student newspaper. “Independent” means that we receive no money from the academic institution that we cover (well… they don’t charge us rent; but, that’s the only help we get). We pay a heavy price for the freedom to set our editorial content – we rely on print advertising for nearly all of our income.

This is a problem. As we’re forced to slowly transition toward an online newsroom, we risk abandoning the money making print edition. This scares our business manager to death. It frightens our board. We all know that the internet is the future, but can’t see a way to monetize online content.

Some choose to bury their heads: we receive roughly half of our daily eyeballs from our website, the other half from the print. That’s means we’ve beat the 10% problem. (Though we don’t come close to the average online revenue percentage of 10%.) Why is it that we seem to be bucking the national trend? I’ve got three guesses.

1. College newspapers are freesheets. The freesheet experiment has been going on for a while now in Europe, and is getting another serious look in the US. The internet has gotten people use to the idea of getting their news for free. The freesheet model gives them this access in hardcopy. Since college newspapers already use this model, they might already have a leg up. At the very least, a high subscription cost is not problem.
2. Colleges represent a niche market. If the internet is leading to a need for hyperlocal news coverage, college newspapers have already mastered the skill. This is a perhaps the one area where we’re ahead of the curve.
3. College students work for cheap. I’d imagine that most college papers pay at least some of their staff (we pay just our editors), but that payroll is extremely small. Therefore our expenses are much less than a professional papers that must pay a living wage.

But, this trend can’t possibly last. Like I already mentioned, we’ve seen ad revenue slip. It’s going to continue to do so unless we come up with an online revenue model.

On a macro level, there are three ways a newspaper can make money.

1. Advertising. Both online and in print.
2. Subscriptions. Charging for the print product, or following the freemium model and charging for premium content online.
3. Donations. From the public (i.e. spot.us) or from a foundation (like ProPublica or a college newspaper).

A part of my job over the last 4 months has been to blend these sources of revenue to generate new income. While I don’t claim to have come up with a solution, here are some thoughts:

• Experiment. Leading off with the most important point. Yes, budgets are tight. Yes, it costs money to experiment. Do it anyway. No one is really sure how to “do” online news. Chances are your budget is only going to get tighter before it gets figured out. Spend the money now ’cause you won’t have it later.
• Video doesn’t make much money. Ouch. Yea, I know it stings. Video takes a lot more effort from the staff, and requires a lot more infrastructure. Translation: it’s expensive. It also doesn’t really pay for itself … yet. But, video is hot. People like it; it’s an area that demands experimentation. We’ve started a few video podcast shows with our sports department. My pitch to convince them to do it? “You guys sit around and talk about sports anyway, just do it in front of a camera.”
• We’re not in the newspaper business, we’re in the media information business. This is the scary part that no bean counter wants to hear. But recognize the truth: if you’re producing online content, you’re not trying to sell a paper. You’ve got a different product all together. A newspaper’s biggest asset is its reporters. They’re experts in their field and have information that the public wants access to. A video podcast may be a good way of distributing that information, but if it doesn’t have a means of monetization it’s not a good business decision. In the same way you wouldn’t print an insert for your paper without selling ads, don’t produce new content online without a plan to make money.
• It’s all about the version 1. If you’re a perfectionist, take a step back a breath, you’re not going to like this one. Experimenting means getting some things wrong. Which means perfecting a new feature before you launch it, is a waste of time. We can’t afford a video camera (yet). So we’ve been shooting nearly all of our video podcasts on the iSight built into our laptops. No, the video quality isn’t great. But, it was affordable, and it gives us an all digital workflow. Not having to transfer video off tapes saves us a lot of time every night. Getting something out the door at 80% is more important than holding it to achieve perfection. Plan on getting better as you do more. You’ll be learning by doing. By the time you get around to version 2, you’ll be ready to tackle the harder stuff. It’s more important that you can deliver regular, ‘just okay’ content, than amazing content that you can only pull off once a year.
• Online publishing doesn’t mean a smaller staff. For small organizations like college papers, you’re going to need just as many people to publish online as you will in print. Trade your designers in for developers, teach your editors how to use your CMS, and get some reporters to blog. Publishing online is cheaper not because you can cut payroll expense, but because you don’t have to pay for newsprint.
• The link economy works. The copy-paste website method that most papers practice isn’t going to cut it in a web-centered newsroom. In order to be a first-class web citizen, we’ve got to start linking out in our stories. Abandon any rules you have about only linking internally. Link to as many places as you can. Google is the number one way people enter our site. Which means SEO is the name of the game. All of this means more site impressions, more impressions translates to more ad dollars. It’s worth your time to train staff on how to embed links because it directly affects your ad revenue.
• Local advertisers need to have incentive to buy online ads. The majority of our site traffic comes from parents and alumni, so local advertising doesn’t make sense. Or, they don’t have websites to advertise.Offer them alternatives to banner ads. Consumers generally find online ads annoying where print ads are seen as informative. Since print ads are usually coupons or notifications of sales, bring those kinds of ads to your site. Students will gladly to to your site to print a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for a local business. Even if that’s all they visit your site for, it’s still a win for all involved.
• Use the free stuff. There’s lots of good, free sites out there that can make your life easier. Vimeo or Blip.tv will gladly host your (HD) video content. Google Calendar will gladly host your community calendar. WordPress will host blogs for you. You can almost run a website for free! Furthermore, putting your content on web 2.0 sites gives you access to a social network greater than your own. This will get your content noticed by an audience that might otherwise have never seen your hard work (especially true for videos). Web 2.0 is your friend!
• Consider alternative forms of online revenue. Some newspapers have setup sites that help students find housing. Sites like this can help replace/supplement classified revenue that newspapers are struggling to account for. This is also a great opportunity to use the freemium model. One idea: let users post one housing listing for free. But charge for more than one listing (landlords with multiple properties).

Producing online content now will prepare your newsroom for the eventual day when online, instead of print, is their daily grind. It takes a while to setup an infrastructure, and with your cash flow unlikely to increase in the near future, now is the time.

Update: Link added to show that coupons are in demand.

Update2: There’s now a page on the wiki about this topic, but it does need to be expanded. Go go crowdsourcing! (Dec 4, 08; 18:10 EST)

Update3: Added alternative forms link. Added “One idea:” (Dec 5 08;, 00:58 EST)